table rules

Our “Table Rules” poster has worked wonders around here. Especially for the smallest person in our house, who you can see, was my major inspiration for the poster.

I whipped it up in a fit of desperation one night before supper. Nothing else was working or getting through to my temperamental little 2 year old. Every night she was making dinnertime stressful with her crazy behavior, I couldn’t take it anymore.

I’m not sure why I haven’t made anything like this sooner… maybe because it just seemed too easy. If your kids aren’t listening to you when you ask them something 100x why would a picture work? Well, it does. When someone is breaking one of our “rules” at dinner time, we simply point to the picture and (mostly) they stop.

It’s also been a big conversation piece with visitors to our home (most likely thinking to themselves “what kind of crazy house is this?!”). People seem to like it …so I thought if this helped us, maybe it might help some others in the same situation.

So I redid the poster and made it into a PDF (b+w, so your kids can colour it in if they want). You can download it by clicking on the button below.

P.S Sosi is pretty horrified I drew her throwing food and wanted me to make it very clear she doesn’t do that. I just couldn’t draw Ila doing everything .

I’ve done the picture-gram for snack choices and to give my kids reminders of the things they like to play – I refer them to it when the dreaded “Mommy, what can I DO???” question gets hurled at me.

(By the way, I’ve also left “notes” for my kids, neither of whom are at reading age. They work similar magic! Idea came from the book “How To Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk” which I love, love, love.)

Wow, what a great idea! We are having minor dinner table behaviour issues at the moment which only get worse with confrontation, so perhaps pointing at a sign will be an improvement. Although after tonight’s dinner behaviour we really need a ‘No noises like a possessed child a la The Exorcist’ picture.

LOVE the visual aides… and the idea for a series of best behaviour posters… i have another one for “time’s up”… I set the timer on the stove and warn andra that when the timer goes, what ever activity she is doing needs to end… when I tell her to end an activity she gets mad at me, but there is no sense getting mad at the inanimate timer, is there? You need to start another blog… a “mom” blog…